The talk opened by expressing that the term “IOT” is used far to broadly, and instead the fix is to break it up into manageable sections. These being “Smart Devices” and “Smart Networks“. Scott continued his talk by focusing on Smart Devices, stating:

The web needs a discovery service. If you were to walk into a space what would it look like?.. We want to bridge the physical and digital world. We’re so use to how the web has been and we’re carrying that baggage with us.

So what is the physical web? Well, if your running an Android device or have Chrome on IOS you may have already seen it. The physical web uses Bluetooth Low Energy to broadcast beacons, containing a website URL. When these beacons are received they are brought up as a notification and listed accordingly. Scott compared the physical web to QR codes, stating:

QR codes work well, but they haven’t really taken off. People just don’t support QR codes… What happens if you have a room full of these [QR code] things? Are you going to run around and scan them all?

It was obvious from the talk that Scott holds a lot of passion for the physical web. In an attempt to share this passion with others he highlighted that the physical web isn’t a product that relies on one singular company. He expressed:

This is not a Google product. We’ve learned everyone loves open source, as long as you do all the work… The whole internet will get better from this.